To the Editor:
I would like to respond to the questions posed in Adam B. Ulam’s generous review of my book, Peace in the Balance [Books in Review, March].
Mr. Ulam asks for more particulars about those of our postwar policies and programs which, in my view, had failed.
About Vietnam, I thought I had made it clear that the military effort was for a long time misconceived and misdirected, and that Johnson should have followed Lincoln’s example in dismissing generals and defense officials until he found men who could win the war, quickly. My central concern, however, was to examine the uncertainties about policy which kept the United States from pursuing the more vigorous military course so natural to our temperament.
With regard to the 1967 crisis in the Middle East, I expressed the conviction that it was a mistake on our part not to have used force to open the Strait of Tiran, in order to prevent the Six-Day War. In that connection, with regard to another point made by Mr. Ulam, the Johnson administration did indeed view the Middle East as a crisis situation from the fall of 1966. It merely instituted special procedures for ’round-the-clock crisis management in the spring of 1967.
Similarly, I criticized our failure to move promptly at the end of World War II (while we still had a nuclear monopoly) to insist on free elections in Eastern Europe, as promised at Yalta and Potsdam, and to prevent the takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948.
The question of error in the execution of policy may define a difference between Mr. Ulam and me, at least in temperament. I expect little of people, and therefore am often pleasantly surprised. Clearly, he expects a great deal of men, and is therefore indignant when they fall short. He suggests that I am “too ready” to treat good intentions as an excuse for mistakes. Not at all. I do, however, accept the inevitability of error in the conduct of affairs more philosophically than he does. Even under the best of circumstances, and with the wisest and most incisive of leaders, the most we can hope for is a batting average good enough to win the game. It is too much to expect more as earnest men respond to inchoate dangers, often dimly perceived.
Perhaps this difference between Mr. Ulam and me accounts for his remark that “most people, including even the more sensible of those Mr. Rostow castigates, would grant that the general line of postwar American policy has been the only one that the United States, in view of its international position and the character of American society, could pursue.” Having painfully examined the literature, I can assure Mr. Ulam that this is not the case. That is why I wrote the book I did, rather than the one he would have preferred—an attempt to clarify what foreign policy is for, not a critical and detailed examination of the way it has been conducted.
Eugene V. Rostow
Yale University Law School
New Haven, Connecticut
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Adam B. Ulam writes:
I continue to believe that what we need above all is more facts. If a “critical and detailed examination of the way” our foreign policy has been conducted is not forthcoming, all of us, the historians as well as the general public, will be left with little in the way of information, except for those titillating gossip chronicles and moralistic diatribes, and it does not matter whether the latter have as their theme “we are guilty” or “we meant well.” And short of a hard, factual account by those in the position to know, how can we tell whether errors in the formulation and execution of our foreign policy were avoidable, whether they sprang from the structure of the decision-making process, the condition of our society, or what? This brings me to another of Eugene V. Rostow’s points: the need to clear away the confusion about the general character of U.S. policy. There always have been, and unfortunately always will be, people who write nonsense, whether well-meant or otherwise. But such nonsense becomes fashionable, hence harmful, only when the general public feels it is not given the facts the citizens of a democracy are entitled to know.
